President's Day 2010
A holiday in the US has Steve Jones on the slopes. A short reminder of patches released last week is the editorial today.
The Community Has Been Heard
Steve Jones talked about the announcements of Service Pack 4 for SQL Server 2005 and Service Pack 2 for SQL Server 2008 in this editorial.
Webinar Series: SQL Server 101
A partnership with Pragmatic Works brings you some basic SQL Server training through a series of webinars.
Use SSIS to import one cell of an Excel file into SQL Server
Recently I needed to find a method to import one cell of an Excel sheet into SQL Server 2005 using a scheduled job on a 64 bit clustered environment. For example, I have a monthly sales report listing sales per product category, such as Books, Magazines, DVDs, etc. I only want to import the Total Sales amount into SQL Server and this number is located in an Excel file "sales.xls.sheet1.cell.B5". I used to use OPENROWSET to solve the problem, however OPENROWSET requires Microsoft Jet OLE DB Provider which is not available in 64 bit. In this tip I am going to talk about how to use SSIS to accomplish this task easily.
Safety in Numbers
One of the core things a DBA must do is ensure backup and recovery of data. This Friday Steve Jones asks about your tolerance for safety and backup data in a Friday poll.
Tips for New DBAs
New and old DBAs alike can benefit from going back to the roots of the profession. This series of articles highlight the skills needed to move to the next level of Database Administration.
Azure Tutorial - Building a'Hello Word' app in Visual Studio
This article demonstrates how to build a simple Azure app using Visual Studio
SSIS Alpha Splits using the CODEPOINT() Function
A relatively common requirement in ETL processing is to break records into disparate outputs based on an alphabetical split on...
Covering Index using Included Columns
This article from Josef Richberg details the benefits of included columns for use in creating a covering index to improve performance.
Blogs
A New Word: los vidados
By Steve Jones
los vidados – n. the half-remembered acquaintances you knew years ago, who you might...
In-Person CISA Training – April 13-16, 2026
By Brian Kelley
I will be leading an in-person Certified Information Systems Auditor (CISA) exam prep class...
EightKB 2026
EightKB is back again for 2026! The biggest online SQL Server internals conference is...
Forums
query to track time spent on individual tasks in SSIS
Hi everyone I am looking at building a query to determine how much time...
SQL Server Transactional Replication from Always On Availability Groups to Azure SQL Database
Comments posted to this topic are about the item SQL Server Transactional Replication from...
Hidden Heroes
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Hidden Heroes
Question of the Day
Identities and Sequences I
When thinking of the Identity property for auto incrementing columns and sequences for the same action, which are explicitly linked to increment a number in a table when a new row is added?
See possible answers